How a Chinese AI Giant Made Chatting—and Surveillance

18 YEARS: 18 THOUGHTS. Congratulations to Power Line for 18 years in the Blogosphere! Not least of which, this moment:

As we were flooded with emails following the post, I called John mid-morning for help sorting through the messages and assessing the information. John took a look and called me back 15 minutes later. “Dan Rather is toast,” he said. “The key to the case is kerning.”

Working for Matt Drudge, Andrew Breitbart linked to the post early that afternoon with a screaming siren on the Drudge Report. By the end of the day some 500,000 readers had visited the post. Inside CBS News they were trying to figure out what had happened. What had happened was one of the great journalistic frauds of all time, the unraveling of which led to Dan Rather’s early retirement from CBS News. In his 2012 memoir, however, Rather stands behind the fraud. He titled the memoir Rather Outspoken. In it he retracts his 2004 on-air apology, writing that it was extracted from him involuntarily by CBS News management. That may be true, but Rather’s defense of the Bush National Guard story in “For the Record” strongly suggests Rather Full of It would be more like it.

9. John and I joked that when they got around to making a movie about Rathergate, Robert Redford might play him and Dustin Hoffman might play me. Wrong! When they made the movie — 2014’s inaptly titledTruth, based on segment producer Mary Mapes’s memoir Truth and Duty — Robert Redford and Cate Blanchett played the perpetrators of the fraud. When it comes to rewriting history, the left never quits and its media adjunct is always there to lend a hand.

10. Andrew Heyward was president of CBS News at the time of Rathergate. He hadn’t spoken much about the scandal for public consumption, but he talked about Truth to the New York Times when the Times celebrated the film at a TimesTalks event with Redford, Blanchett, Rather and Mapes. Heyward told the Times that the film “takes people responsible for the worst embarrassment in the history of CBS News, and what was at the time a grievous blow to the credibility of a proud news organization, and turns them into martyrs and heroes. Only Hollywood could come up with that.”

One might say that truer words were never spoken.

Liu QINGFENG  has a vision that voice computing will someday penetrate every sphere of society. He recently told an interviewer for an online state media video channel: “It will be everywhere, as common as water and electricity.” That's a dream that aligns neatly with the Chinese Communist Party's vision for a surveillance state.

How a Chinese AI Giant Made Chatting—and Surveillance—Easy

Alexa can tell you the weather. Siri knows a few jokes. In China, voice-computing company iFlytek built similar smart assistants beloved by users. But its tech is also helping the government listen in.

In the United States, companies like Apple have fought hard against the perception that their devices are always listening. In China, though, it was a selling point. A Flying Fish sales rep said: “You only have to wake it up one time, and then it's awake.”

In 1937, the year that George Orwell was shot in the neck while fighting fascists in Spain, Julian Chen was born in Shanghai. His parents, a music teacher and a chemist, enrolled him in a school run by Christian missionaries, and like Orwell he became fascinated by language. He studied English, Russian, and Mandarin while speaking Shanghainese at home. Later he took on French, German, and Japanese. In 1949, the year Mao Zedong came to power and Orwell published 1984, learning languages became dangerous in China. In the purges of the late 1950s, intellectuals were denounced, sent to labor camps, and even executed. Chen, who by then was a student at prestigious Peking University, was banished to a Beijing glass factory.

Chen's job was to cart wagons full of coal and ash to and from the factory's furnace. He kept his mind nimble by listening to his coworkers speak. At night, in the workers' dormitory, he compiled a sort of linguistic ethnography for the Beijing dialect. He finished the book around 1960. Soon after, Communist Party apparatchiks confiscated it.

My Tatranka subor choir has gone Viral in mother Russia

$60b JobKeeper error caused by pandemic fears

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg was in Melbourne last Thursday night and received a late phone call from Treasury deputy secretary Jenny Wilkinson in Canberra.
ATO Second Commissioner Jeremy Hirschhorn says about 550 businesses with one employee mistakenly reported that they had 1500 eligible staff, confusing it with the $1500 fortnightly payment.

No extra money was paid, because the $9 billion in payments so far can only go to employees with verified tax file numbers.

‘‘I stress that that was an estimate which we collected for analytical purposes only,'' Hirschhorn says. ‘‘It made not one difference to the amount we have paid. We have made no underpayments or overpayments.''

100,000 deaths reflected on front page of NYT  with 1000 names a more readable PDF version and an online version that scrolls and scrolls and scrolls. They compiled the list by going through obituaries from local newspapers from around the countries.

Putting 100,000 dots or stick figures on a page “doesn’t really tell you very much about who these people were, the lives that they lived, what it means for us as a country,” Ms. Landon said. So, she came up with the idea of compiling obituaries and death notices of Covid-19 victims from newspapers large and small across the country, and culling vivid passages from them. 

Alain Delaquérière, a researcher, combed through various sources online for obituaries and death notices with Covid-19 written as the cause of death. He compiled a list of nearly a thousand names from hundreds of newspapers. A team of editors from across the newsroom, in addition to three graduate student journalists, read them and gleaned phrases that depicted the uniqueness of each life lost: 

“Alan Lund, 81, Washington, conductor with ‘the most amazing ear’ … “

“Theresa Elloie, 63, New Orleans, renowned for her business making detailed pins and corsages … “

“Florencio Almazo Morán, 65, New York City, one-man army … “ 

“Coby Adolph, 44, Chicago, entrepreneur and adventurer … “

Every one of these names was a person with a whole life behind them and so much more to come. Each has a family and friends who are mourning them. Here are a few more of their names and short stories:

Romi Cohn, 91, New York City, saved 56 Jewish families from the Gestapo.

Jermaine Ferro, 77, Lee County, Fla., wife with little time to enjoy a new marriage. 

Julian Anguiano-Maya, 51, Chicago, life of the party.

Alan Merrill, 69, New York City, songwriter of “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

Lakisha Willis White, 45, Orlando, Fla., was helping to raise some of her dozen grandchildren.

In the past five months, more Americans have died from Covid-19 than in the decade-plus of the Vietnam War and the death toll is a third of the number of Americans who died in World War II. When this is over (whatever that means), the one thing we cannot do is forget all of these people. And we owe to them to make this mean something.